The Louisville Project

Louisville, KY and IDEAS 40203 welcome NY artist Man Bartlett in his discovery project to promote diabetes awareness for Thrive365 - the mobile health platform which liberates and empowers people with diabetes to enjoy the foods they love. As part of the project Bartlett will be exhibiting select works at Zephyr Gallery that examine the corporate influence and cultural impact of diabetes, as well as creating an interactive installation and “research clinic” to conduct interviews with people with prediabetes and Type 2 Diabetes.

The opening at Zephyr Gallery will be on Thursday February 5th. The artist will be giving a talk about his artistic practice, and how this project relates. You can also follow Man onTwitter, Tumblr and Instagram as he makes his way around town.

The Object of an Act of Thought

“The Object of an Act of Thought” brings together recent work in a wide range of media including painting, drawing, collage, animated gif, video, and performance documentation.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from Kant’s notion of the noumenon, which is understood as “a posited object or event that is known (if at all) without the use of the senses.”* Noumenon and its converse, phenomenon, can serve as a framework when thinking about the extent to which we can know things as they are versus knowing things as they appear. The convergence of these two opposing forces within an art object is a guiding principle by which I’ve made the work presented in this exhibition, and employing a variety of artistic devices, I’ve approached each creation through the manipulation of the relationship of a medium to itself.

The drawings follow the tradition of meditative mark-making, guided by an awareness of the act of the pen on the paper over time. They seek to balance an organic chaos within the defined boundaries of a structured plane.

The Case Studies, collages sourced from advertisements in Holiday Magazine, present mid-20th century characters in prototypically American postures with psychologically comical replacements for their heads. Made of anthropomorphized suitcases, cameras and radios they emphasize the relationship between the consumer product and the consumed that defined the post-war American economy, and reveal the culture of innovation that celebrated luxury and the promise of access to a newly minted middle class.

Continuing the tongue-in-cheek approach are “Blue Chip Art” and “Tips for Instagrammers Who Want More Likes.” These one-liners are insider art world commentaries on art about art, the former a reference to the expensive end of the art market that is referred to as “blue chip art,” the latter an update on John Baldessari’s “Tips For Artists Who Want To Sell.” These two works also embody an economy of means: "Blue Chip Art" was created with paint chips appropriated from a hardware store near the artist’s studio, while “Tips..." was outsourced to a Chinese Paint Mill, the contemporary equivalent to Baldessari’s hiring a sign-painter.

The three animated GIFs presented for “The Object of an Act of Thought” were created ritualistically by throwing 12 gold-painted peppercorns around a crystal icosehedron, four different times onto a flatbed scanner, in three iterations. The frames were compiled, animated, and exported with an extreme type of image compression: black and white, with noise dithering. Notably, the gifs are offered for sale utilizing monegraph, a new method to authenticate digital works by using metadata in the bitcoin block chain to denote current ownership of a particular file by URL.

Two video works, “CIRCLEFEED” and “LINEFEED” are the direct representation of stylized VHS feedback. In “CIRCLEFEED,” a camera was pointed at a television monitor, for “LINEFEED,” the same camera was directed at a connected laptop. The motion was created by the slow, hypnotic movement of the zoom of the lens and slight directional shifts. Both of these videos contain binaural beats (an effect of playing different frequencies on the left and right audio channels to create a phantom "third sound") that can only be experienced on headphones.

“Lost & Found” was a performance for an audience in Amsterdam (via Skype) where I asked people on Twitter what they were afraid of, and what they were looking forward to. I then created a heavily mediated ritual around their responses, as well as what random people were tweeting about these same topics. It was the latest in a long string of actions dating back to 2010 that use Twitter as a medium of artistic creation to attempt to reconcile online and physical audiences under a simple conceit.

In another performance, I recorded myself alone in my studio, auditioning for “The Role of the Artist.” As of this writing, I’m still waiting to hear if I got a callback.